The Life of Chuck

15 June 2025: When a movie opens with Walt Whitman, it has my attention. And The Life of Chuck is a sweet and moving film that earns its evocation of the Good Gray Poet. I found myself tearing up and smiling and just really loved it. 

“lonely old courage-teacher”

31 May 2025: 

“Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?” –Allen Ginsberg’s closing line to “A Supermarket in California”

Like every year when we reach May 31, I find myself thinking about Whitman. This year, with everything that he loved about America under attack, I find myself voicing the least poetic and almost embarrassing echo of Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California.” 

This could not have been the America Whitman had in mind when he took his last breath. The ignorance, hate, and cruelty can bring you to your knees with sadness. (And here I think of the bowed knees in "The Wound Dresser," an symbol of devastation, exhaustion, and deepest pain, but also respect, holiness, humility, and servitude.)

And here I see that maybe I am wrong or at least not completely right—and here I contradict myself, I guess—because he also would see a lot to love and so many to root for. On a quiet Saturday night, my mind fills with images of those who give me faith and hope, even if they sit alongside all of what makes me despair. 

Our “lonely old courage-teacher” is more important than ever. 

"Think not we give out yet..."

19 December 2024: Ah, Walt...

"Sounds of the Winter" 

Walt Whitman

Sounds of the winter too,

Sunshine upon the mountains—many a distant strain

From cheery railroad train—from nearer field, barn, house

The whispering air—even the mute crops, garner’d apples, corn,

Children’s and women’s tones—rhythm of many a farmer and of flail,

And old man’s garrulous lips among the rest, Think not we give out yet,

Forth from these snowy hairs we keep up yet the lilt.

"Whitman, Melville, and Baseball"

20 October 2024: 

“Did you see the baseball boys are home from their tour around the world? How I’d like to meet them — talk with them: maybe ask them some questions...That’s beautiful: the hurrah game! well — it’s our game: that’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life." --Whitman on baseball in 1889.

The Yankees won the ALCS yesterday and are off to their first World Series since 2009. I am, of course, delighted. But if they hadn't clinched it last night--if the series had gone on and maybe even if they lost it--I would still be delighted by the games. That's one way you know you love baseball, I think: even when your team loses, you can have a blast. Anyway, for a trivia game I am writing for some colleagues, I came across this piece about Whitman, Melville, and baseball. Well worth a read!

Section 15

31 May 2024: Thinking today about section 15 of "Song of Myself," where Whitman catalogues the people in his vision of America. A particular cluster always stands out to me:

"The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly,

The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open'd lips,

The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,

The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,

(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;)

The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries,

On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms..."

In just a few words, each of these people emerges as worthy of our attention. Some of these lines (those about the bride, for instance) operate like like bits of flash fiction. Note that he gives three lines to the prostitute, for whom he feels deep compassion. Note how, even in 1855, Whitman sees the drug addict and finds him worthy of inclusion. And right after this collection--bride, drug addict, sex-worker--he moves to the President--and then moves on just as quickly to describe three older women, bonded by friendship. All are here. All are worthy. All of them (and us) matter. This is democracy rendered (aspirationally) through poetry. 

And then he explains it better than I ever could: 

"And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,

And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,

And of these one and all I weave the song of myself."

Happy birthday, Walt. 

"Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars"

8 November 2023: Had a Whitman moment when I got home today (another long day--not all bad, but overwhelming...). Needed to get some more steps in and headed out for a bit. Looked up, felt my breath catch at the beauty of the clear night sky. Breathed in the cool air and embraced being quiet and alive. 

He is a lot...

22 September 2023: "I know you really like this guy and I like a lot of it, too, but I also had to walk away for a minute once or twice." --a student in ENGL 204 with a kind of perfectly hilarious take on Whitman. 

Best part of the job, every single day. 

Honeysuckles...

31 May 2022: The moment I arrived on campus this morning, I got approached--in the parking lot--about being on a search committee. About an hour later, as I tried to get some work done on my Wilson entry, I got an email asking me to take on another project. So I did what I do when I feel stressed and overwhelmed: I took my walk. Stopped for a moment to smell the honeysuckles along the way. Not a bad way to reset my mind and to honor Walt's birthday. 

"to be with those I like is enough..."

31 May 2021: Obligatory annual “Happy birthday to my poetry boyfriend, Walt” post. Here he is giving us post-vaccine summer vibes. Hard not to get emotional:

“I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them . . to touch any one . . . . to rest my arm ever so lightly round
his or her neck for a moment . . . . what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight . . . . I swim in it as in a sea.”

Putting Christmas "away," but not really...

3 January 2021: Took down and put away all of the Christmas decorations today (except the outside lights, which I'll do later this week). It seemed to go more quickly this year (probably because I put fewer things out) and it is sort of nice to have everything look clean and normal again, but it's also (always) depressing work. Feels a bit like Christmas didn't really happen. I don't mean in a spiritual sense--I've thought more about the meaning of the Nativity and the Word made flesh more this year than in some time. Rather, of course, I mean Christmas didn't happen in the sense of traditions, family, friends...

I still have my parents' presents, all wrapped and waiting for them. Seeing them sitting in the living room is just a downer. Our eventual gift exchange will probably feel like a poor simulacrum of Christmas. And Lord help me, it's just so hard to know that it didn't have to be this way. That we could have done better to fight this pandemic. That we have failed so miserably. And that my silly sadness about Christmas is nothing compared to what others have lost and what will be lost.

Today also brought more craziness from our corrupt and evil president, this time a nefarious recording of a desperate man trying to persuade and intimidate election officials. This as nearly 350,000 people are dead and he has done nothing but make everything worse. It's infuriating, sickening, and just so wearying. 

The rhythms of this post--moving from personal/individual to a wider look at the country and the world and seeing so much needless pain--are the rhythms of pandemic life for me, I guess. We are, as Walt reminds us, a "knit of identity," and as Frances E.W. Harper tells us "all bound up together in great one bundle of humanity." It is useful, vital, and essential to be reminded of this, and so strange to see it again and again in a time when I feel so physically separated from others. 

I am telling myself now (as I write this) that it's worth thinking about the message of Christmas again, the individual child who saved a broken world. A huge gesture of love and sacrifice that we ought to emulate and revere. There is that light in the darkness--I think we can see it if we look hard enough.

Moody, rambling Sunday thoughts, I know...

"I hear America singing"

7 November 2020: We did it. Overcome with joy and hope, even though the road ahead will be so hard. 

Tell em, Walt!

"Here for It, or How to Save Your Soul in America"

29 June 2020: "And if ever there was a time to play the national anthem, it's then. It's in this place where something new is being built, where people are united in one goal, with one voice, where the future is hard to make out but, yes, it's there. We're there. Better and more complicated. That's the only country I can survive in. I don't live in that country, but every day by existing, by speaking, by loving, by writing, I make a vow to get there, step-by-step." --R. Eric Thomas

I finished Here for It early today--just after midnight--and closed it with that sad satisfaction that comes at the end of every great book. Thomas finished the book before our current moment of dual (linked) crises, but it is amazingly such a gift for this time. It is so hard not to get bogged down in the hopelessness that seems to surround us right now. But Thomas looks at hopelessness and brings in what has always helped us endure in America--love, family, friendship, joy. Those don't erase the bad parts, but they give us a kind of antidote, or at least to kind of squint into the distance to see something better. That is--and has long been--a profoundly moving part of American identity.

Starting another book today that in some ways couldn't be more different: Walking to Listen, by Andrew Forsthoefel, this year's Common Reading at Shepherd. But already, I can see some connections.

And whose voice was in my head as I read the words quoted above--from Thomas's penultimate chapter, about his wedding? Of course, it was Walt. And whose book does Forsthoefel carry with him on his journey across America? Do I even have to write it?

201...

31 May 2020:

"I onward go, I stop,
With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds,
I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable,
One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you,
Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you." --Whitman, "The Wound Dresser"

One year ago, we celebrated Walt's 200th birthday with joy and optimism. Today, as my country is in such pain and turmoil and the darkness seems unending, I keep thinking about these lines from "The Wound Dresser." Whitman's speaker repeatedly goes to his knees in the face of such pain--an image that resonates so powerfully today--and is determined to do what he can. There, on his knees, he is better able to serve and help, but he is also humbled, in the gesture of seeking supplication and perhaps even of prayer.

He's also not a soldier; he is old, with creaking knees, and arriving after the fight. The fight isn't his, but of course it is.

So yeah...thinking about it a lot today.

Made it!

22 November 2019: Well, we did it: made it to Thanksgiving Break during this, one of the hardest semesters of my career at Shepherd. Whew!

And Friday was actually kind of awesome. Taught three terrific classes: The Awakening in one, "Sexy" in another, and "Song of Myself" in the third. I was feeling it all. (My fourth class, Bible as Literature, didn't meet--we've been doing paper conferences instead.) And right now I feel--temporarily--caught up. I can breathe a bit.

So the break starts on a good note...

Walt's 200th Birthday Bash

31 May 2019: Our little celebration went off without a hitch. What a wonderful day!

"every one is signed by God's name..."

19 March 2019:

“Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name,
And I leave them where they are,
for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever." --Whitman, "Song of Myself"

We started Whitman today in ENGL 312. Perfect for yet another day with the promise of spring in the air and so much to embrace about life.

Whitman on the brain...

28 November 2018: Even more than on a normal day, Walt was on my mind today. First, we talked about "A Supermarket in California" in my 204 classes. Then this evening, a student I've been working with on her capstone project on Whitman and Hamilton had her presentation. She quoted some of these lines from "Song of Myself," which will serve quite well for today's post:

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels."

Paper Walt...

3 October 2018: A gift from a student in my ENGL 204 class. Not even at midterm yet, but they get me. "I'll put it next to my Whitman finger puppet!" is a sentence I, a real adult human, said out loud.

Walt Day!

31 May 2018:

Happy birthday to my "poetry boyfriend," Walt Whitman.

“Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name,
And I leave them where they are,
for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.”

An unexpected gift...

4 April 2018:

Today a student dropped off a gift she picked up for me (it was at a "free" table at the library). Her kindness made my day.